This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop the innovations needed to build a medical personnel scheduling system that can effectively deal with the hundreds of constraints specified by physicians and management, many of which change every month.
Hospitals are spending an increasing amount of money each year on Information Technology. According to an American Hospital Association report, healthcare facilities will spend $31 billion on IT in 2006 compared with $19 billion in 2000. The goal of these expenditures is to increase the productivity of the hospitals. Most of the nearly six thousand hospitals in the United States still create their medical staff schedules manually. If commercialized, the advancements developed under this grant will allow schedules to be produced by automatically relaxing some of the constraints. Systems using these innovations could save hospitals a considerable amount of resources and hence contribute to decreasing costs.
